Narcopolis (10 page)

In the morning a cadre came to his quarters with a summons to the commissariat. He thought: How did they find out? What did I do? What did I do? He dressed quickly and followed the man to a room where Commissar Hu stood in front of a blackboard with a dozen or so others. There was a table with sweet cakes and tea and cigarette packs arranged in the shape of a pyramid. There were men who were so important that no one knew their names. They smoked and interrupted
Commissar
Hu’s speech with rude jokes: Commissar, we heard you last night. The earth shook so much we thought the building would surely fall. Later, Wei Kuo-ching also made a speech and Lee tried to pay attention but he heard only some of the words:
blockade
and
industrial production
and
railway shipments
and
sabotage
and
military supplies
. He heard the words but he was unable to fit them together into a coherent pattern. He thought about Pang Mei, how she’d slept through the earthquake, how delicate her feet were, and how lucky he was. At noon Lee was told he would be going to the province capital of Wuhan, where he was to meet the regional military commander, the warlord General Lo Tsai-ta, and negotiate an end to the factional fighting that had paralysed the city. Commissar Hu told him he had an hour to pack. As he left the commissariat he looked for Pang Mei but she was nowhere to be seen.

The trip to Wuhan took a little less than four hours. He was travelling with a group of Red Guards who changed seats throughout the flight. They pointed out of the window and laughed. What were they laughing at? Nothing could be seen except a grey wall of clouds and rain or condensation. He heard a high whine from the small plane’s twin engines and he felt the vibration from the metal under his feet. When people walked up and down the aisle the plane wobbled. At times it shook so violently that he thought it would surely fall from the sky and he found he was gripping the armrests.
There was an
announcement
. Passengers carrying guns, ammunition and radioactive material were asked to hand them over to the attendants who would return said items when the flight landed. At this, some of the Red Guards handed over an assortment of weapons, including rifles, pistols and army-issue knives. Traditional music followed. Lee listened until the music faded into a hiss. He slept for a little while and was woken by another announcement: the plane was approaching Wuhan, which was a great industrial city of central China. Passengers were forbidden to take pictures from the aircraft windows or on the ground. There was a pause. Then the voice said that those who wished to alight could do so. The plane circled several times before landing. The attendants returned the Red Guards’ weapons. More music was heard on the intercom, not Chinese selections but a song from the Western movie
Mary Poppins
.

When Lee stepped off the aircraft he saw that the runway was in disarray: planes and trucks were parked pell-mell and groups of young men and women walked around issuing orders that only added to the chaos. They strolled across the tarmac as if it was a village lane or they squatted and smoked and wrote slogans on the dirt. The sun was out and as Lee walked toward the airport building he heard his name called by the young Guards who were on the flight with him. They were gathered around a jeep that had driven right up to the plane. They waved to him and Lee walked back. The Guards had convinced the driver of the jeep to take them to the city, they said, and Lee was welcome to ride with them. They all crowded into the vehicle. As it left the airport and took the road into the city, the Guards decided they wanted to eat at a restaurant. Hey, hey, hey, driver, said one, if you see a pig run it over, we’re hungry. The driver smiled and said nothing. The Guards seemed to Lee like teenagers, they were obnoxious and without shame. They were never silent. At the restaurant they ordered char siu fan and beer and when it was time to pay they told the proprietor they had no money. Lee had cash but the younger men wouldn’t let him take out his purse. No, no, you are our guest. Do you want us to lose face? They turned to the proprietor. We invite you to Peking, they told him. Come to Peking so we may exchange revolutionary ideas. You will be our guest. The man knew better than to argue.

From his hotel that night, Lee made a phone call but the operator said she was not in her room. He tried the number at hourly intervals and gave up around dawn. The next morning he was late for his meeting with the man Commissar Hu had described as a warlord. General Lo Tsai-ta got up when Lee was shown in. But instead of making him feel welcome, the general picked up his cigarettes, excused himself and left the room. Some time later an assistant appeared to tell Lee that the general would not be available until later in the day, there was a crisis at the railway terminus that required his presence. Lee left the compound and walked to the end of the street and turned right as if he knew where he was going. There were no buses or taxis but the street was full of people. Uncleared garbage and old newspapers lay on the corner. He kept walking and came to a bridge, the famous bridge known throughout the country as a marvel of modern engineering. At its base, a man was cooking rice for his family. There were people swimming in the river and clothes spread out to dry on the parapets. Lee walked past a lecture group of some sort, a class of five or six who sat in a circle and listened to a woman reciting something. Was it poetry or the words of a song? He caught a few lines:

Now he could see the entire span of the bridge. He noticed that there were small knots of people sitting throughout the length of it and some kind of obstruction at the other end. He stopped when he saw what it was, stopped, turned around and went back the way he’d come. A bus had been parked crossways and on the far side of the bus was a snaking line of cars and trucks and military transport vehicles, a line that stretched further than he could see. The drivers had disappeared and the vehicles looked like they hadn’t moved in a long time. Below him the muddy Yangtse too was immobile, as if it had turned to cement.

It was night when he returned to the general’s office. Lo Tsai-ta was on the couch, a Panama hat worn low over his closed eyes and a cigarette burning in his hand. He wore a white shirt and linen trousers to go with the hat, but the overall effect of the ensemble wasn’t elegance as much as exhaustion. He seemed too tired to speak. There were two other men in the room who greeted Lee as if they knew him well. One, an officer who gave his name only as Tung, took him to a table where a bottle and glasses had been arranged. Lee poured himself a brandy and soda. He took a quick swallow of the drink and carried his glass and stood at the window. Sit here, said Tung, and Lee took a seat on the couch opposite the general. He noticed that General Lo’s eyes had followed his progress from the window to the couch but otherwise the general was inert, like a convalescent. Lee placed his drink on the floor and waited with his elbows on his knees. After a time the general lifted his arm and took a slow sip of his cigarette. Tung and his colleague were having a whispered conversation. Lee couldn’t hear Tung but the other man’s one-word responses were clear enough. Kaolu, he said, whenever Tung stopped for breath.

Eventually, Tung turned to Lee. Wuhan is a test case, he said. Everything happens here: the plague, riots, surplus productivity, famine, tremendous industrial output, the end of everything. We believe Peking is using us as a kind of social experiment. They want to see how much punishment a city can take before it shuts down. They’ve posed an interesting question or set of questions, I will say that much. For example, how much chaos can the human system absorb? What are the uses of insanity? Is there intelligence in negativity? How far can destruction extend before it stops being creative? How useful is chance? Can the individual imagination apprehend the last beach, the last birdsong, the last sunset in the last sky? The inhabitants of Wuhan have thought about all these questions, we’ve thought about and discussed them in great detail. We’ve answered them too, if only to our own satisfaction. There’s only one question we are incapable of answering. Do you know what it is?

Lee thought: Why do you continue to stay here? But he shook his head. No, he said.

Tung said, ‘What are you doing here?’

At this all three men looked at Lee as if he had just then
appeared
out of thin air.

‘I’ve been sent by the Party to look carefully at what is
happening
in Wuhan,’ said Lee. ‘I am expected to make a report and that’s as far as my responsibility goes.’

Tung was shaking his head even before Lee finished. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’

It was then that Lee chose to make a comment about the Mao Tse-tung Thought Million Fighting Wuhan Revolutionary Heroic Workers Troops, a coalition the general was known to support, though not openly. The Workers Troops was larger than its older rival, the Wuhan Area Proletarian Mao Tse-tung Thought Fighting Workers Centre, which had the support of Peking. Lee said he thought the Workers Troops was the cause of much of the rioting and disorder on the streets.

Tung made a spitting sound. ‘You are ignorant,’ he said. ‘It is the Workers Centre that has caused unrest in Wuhan.’

Lee nodded slowly. Then he said, ‘There’s talk in Peking that the Workers Troops should be disbanded.’

At this the general got to his feet and gestured that Lee should do the same. ‘This meeting is at an end,’ he said. It was the first time he’d spoken in Lee’s presence and it served as a kind of signal to Tung, who threw his cigarette to the floor and shouted a slogan against the Workers Centre. Lee wasn’t sure what he was shouting because Tung was too angry to articulate his words properly. He marched around the room and stopped in front of Lee.

‘I am prepared to sacrifice my life,’ Tung said. ‘We are soldiers. This is what we have trained for, self-sacrifice. You tell them that.’ Then he walked out and let the door bang behind him.

When Lee returned to his hotel and placed a call to Pang Mei it was well past midnight. He heard the phone ring at the engineering college hostel and then he heard a siren and people shouting in the courtyard below. Wei? said the switchboard operator in Peking. The noise in the courtyard became louder and there were announcements on a public address system. Lee hung up and went to the window. A fire truck and a covered transport vehicle were entering the hotel’s gates, and a loudspeaker van and men carrying rifles and choppers and home-made spears. He went to the door and locked it and placed another call. He was talking to the receptionist at the
commissariat
when they broke open the door and punched him to the floor. He got up and a man who looked somehow familiar slapped him on the side of the head, so hard that his glasses flew off his face and landed on the carpet halfway across the room. There was a ringing in his ears and someone hit him low in the stomach and someone else kicked his feet out from under him. Lee landed on his back. There were flecks of blood on his shirt and his ribs felt bruised. They pulled him to his feet and bound his hands behind his back. Then they marched him out of the building and towards one of the vans. The lobby was in pandemonium. The hotel’s official cars had been overturned and gutted and a tree in the courtyard was ablaze. The staff stood under the portico. As Lee was brought down the steps he saw a man run towards the gate. A small mob set upon him with bare hands and rifle butts and brought him down. The man shouted: Help me, comrades, help me. Who was he talking to? How odd, thought Lee, that fear should make you ask for help from the exact source of your torment. A man with a chopper stepped up and cut off the fallen man’s arms with precise and economical strokes. The man twitched and shivered as he gazed at his severed arms and the ropes of blood that joined them. His lips moved and the words he spoke, if at all he was speaking, were inaudible. Blood pooled around his hips. He sat up and vomited and the crowd stepped back in disgust. Then the man with the chopper cut off his head, though this took some effort because the chopper was no longer sharp and wouldn’t cut through the neck bones.

Lee was the only prisoner but there were so many men escorting him that the van was cramped and humid. His clothes were soaked through with blood and perspiration and without his glasses he felt crippled, though he was able to see the faces of his abductors clearly enough. He wondered what time it was and then he thought about Pang Mei’s complicated virginity and for some reason the song-like words he had heard earlier that day – or had it been yesterday? – repeated in his head like a prayer,
Time is a bomb; the world is on fire.
He couldn’t remember the rest of the words, though he heard very clearly the voice of the woman who had recited them. The men in the vehicle spoke as if he was not there, or as if he was already dead. They talked about barbecue pork and home-made rice wine, about how long one could swim comfortably in the
summer
before the silt of the river weighed you down (no more than an hour), about the comparative advantages of cards over mahjong (less wastage of time, more chances of quick money), about the efficacy of deer penis as an aphrodisiac (excellent), and about Lee’s fate, whether he would be executed publicly or disposed of with minimum fanfare (the consensus: publicly, with a shot to the back of the neck). Kaolu, said one of the men, and it was then that Lee recognized the man who had been in General Lo’s office. His abductors were soldiers. They wore armbands that identified them as members of the Workers Troops but in fact they were soldiers; no, they were mutineers. It was they who were already dead, thought Lee.

They took him to a building that looked like the garrison headquarters; they took him to a cell and left him alone. Some hours later, two men came in and stripped off his clothes and beat him, very methodically, until he passed out. He was woken by pain. He knew he’d been unconscious for some time, minutes maybe, or hours; it was hard to tell because time had expanded. Every part of his body throbbed or burned. The pain slowed time and a single moment became something impossibly complex that took all his resources to endure. His pulse throbbed in his ears and hours passed between each beat. He slept and woke and slept again and he felt like a visitor to an unknown solar system where time speeded up and slowed down at random intervals. They gave him congee and he slept. And then the men returned and beat him again. This was how he knew a day had passed, two days, three and four days. He was settling into a kind of routine, he was beginning to focus his mind around the pain and he was preparing himself for worse, when, suddenly, a new set of abductors took over from the old. They opened the door of his cell and someone he hadn’t seen before said, Is this him? Yes, said Tung, whose hands were tied. The new abductors put Lee in a jeep and took him on a long drive. It was night-time and the stars were low in the sky. There were more stars than he had ever thought possible, so many stars that it was easy to lose himself among them, all he had to do was let his head loll back on the seat and look up at the infinite. There was a smell of eucalyptus and manure. He heard birds and wondered why they were awake in the middle of the night. Were they as confused as he by the hitherto unseen elasticity of time? The new abductors drove out of Wuhan and stopped on a dirt road that curved upwards into the hills. They didn’t beat him. They fed him and gave him a change of clothes and put a bandage around his ribs. They drove some more and stopped at an airfield, where they put him on a plane to Peking.

He made phone calls from the hospital and discovered that Pang Mei was no longer working in the commissariat or registered at the engineering hostel as a resident. He made more calls. He learned that a teacher he knew, one of his father’s old friends, had committed suicide. Others had simply vanished and were thought to be dead. He was still being treated for his injuries when Wei Kuo-ching came to see him.

‘The killers are barely out of their teens, rabid youths, so-called radicals who hunt in gleeful packs,’ said the usually
dapper
Wei, looking bedraggled, and was he smelling of wine? ‘Anything can happen to anyone at any time. Did you hear what happened to Commissar Hu?

A big-character wall poster appeared one day, said Wei,
denouncing
Hu as a “son of a landlord,” a “degenerate dog” and a “seller of scars”. Those kinds of names are thrown around a lot these days, so maybe he should have ignored it. But the poster also said Hu was guilty of sexual perversion with degenerate like-minded women. You know Hu or you don’t, but he’s not the kind of man who will take abuse without fighting back. He called a meeting. He said his accusers were reactionaries and rightists. They were a danger to the Party. He said they were cowards, hiding behind the anonymity of wall posters. He challenged them to come out into the open. The same night fresh wall posters went up accusing Hu of counter-
revolution
. The accusations and counter-accusations were noticed and the Party sent a Work Team to investigate. The Work Team banned the students from putting up any more posters, but it also reproved Hu, saying he should confess to some of his mistakes. Instead of restoring the peace, the team’s actions had the opposite effect. The students defied the ban and plastered posters all over the city. They mobilized student groups in other cities and they sent spokesmen to the highest levels of the party bureaucracy. The response must have been favourable because they stepped up their attacks. The next lot of wall posters gave details of Hu’s alleged perversions. Prostitutes. Group sex. Sodomy. Homosexuality. And it was at this stage that Hu made his terrible mistake. He denied all charges and then he said, so what if it is true? Even the Chairman isn’t a eunuch when it comes to sex. They came for him the next day. They put black paint on his face and paraded him through the streets. They put him in a cage and hung a sign on the bars,
animal exhibition
. They didn’t let him sleep or wash or talk. It took two weeks for him to confess that he had impugned the Chairman and that he was guilty of sexual and other crimes. Pang Mei testified that he had taken advantage of her and introduced her to foreign perversions. His own daughters were forced to denounce him. He’s being purged, said Wei. But the only question Lee could think of asking was, What happened to Pang Mei?

She was disgraced, said Wei. The students took turns to work on her in groups. They humiliated her, taunted her, called her names on the street, talked to her family and colleagues, raided her quarters at all hours of day and night. After a few weeks, when they knew she was nearing her breaking point, they put up a poster that said she would not be allowed to commit suicide. I heard she was sent away for re-education through labour. Isn’t it a good thing you decided not to marry her? What a mistake you would have committed. Then Wei said, I’m here to warn you. There have been posters attacking our department, and me personally. If I am under attack, you are next. There are few things you can be certain of at this time: blood lust; group attacks against those who are alone or isolated; packs of dogs running wild through the streets; the end. This is our reality. Anything can happen to anyone at any time.